Just got approved for the Microsoft BIZSpark Developer Program which is not only 100% FREE but actually provides you with a 2-YEAR MSDN License for over 50 products, using the full license model. Anyone from ANY country can qualify as long as you have been in business LESS THAN 5 years and do less than $1,000,000 a year (USD). (Profits of Sales? Not sure, but does it mater? They actually do not even differentiate. And the BEST PART? You get a FREE Azure hosting account for up to $2,500 a month in usage credits, which is just a LOT of system cycles. Tons of storage, bandwidth, software and cycles. Like a kid in a candy store. http://www.microsoft.com/BIZspark for more info. Sounded too good to be true but so far it is more than expected. You have to make sure that there is a CLUSTERED INDEX for each and every table however, before it will run on Azure SQL 2012. Still migrating, but will keep you all posted. Go for it.

Turns out that running classic ASP 3.0 on Windows Azure requires a few little workarounds like this one which I will post as I discover them for the benefit of mankind (and womankind) in general: Hide threads Keyboard Shortcuts

Richard 5:07 am on September 20, 2011 Reply

Running Classic ASP on Azure

By default, classic asp is not enabled on a Windows Azure Web Role. You can easily install it with a startup task:

1. Create a Startup.cmd file in your ASP.NET project.

2. By default text files are saved as ‘Unicode (UTF-8 with signature) – Codepage 65001#8242;. Unfortunatly this seems to add an extra unwanted character to the start of the file, which prevents the script form being run. Go to ‘Advanced Save Options…’ in the file menu of Visual Studio, and ‘US-ASCII – Codepage 20127#8242;.

3. On the properties of this file, set ‘Copy to Output Directory’ to ‘Copy if newer’.

All righty then. Phase One of the Migration of VPASP 7.0 dev site to Microsoft Azure is completed. That is the easy part though. I used the first connection string just below here which is ODBC and I will check out the next two later this week.

And even considering that I am hosting the ASP 3.0 pages on a non-Azure Virtual Server at one site and of course, the SQL Azure DB on yet another Microsoft BIZSpark site, the performance improvement is just immense. And I have geo-redundancy implemented as part of the Azure plan, too. Getting the Classic ASP 3.0 to run correctly on a native Azure website is proving to be just a tad problematic however. Here is how Azure sets up the path to your file system: C:\DWASFiles\Sites\[Insert your WebServerPrefix]\VirtualDirectory0\site\wwwroot\default.asp Maybe I will put in a request for VPASP Support if enough people are interested in using Azure SQL as their backend at a minimum or even asking for documentation as to how to get Classic ASP 3.0 to run correctly on an Azure Web platform. More postings to come later. This would really extend the life of both the entire VPASP product line and give a very nice upgrade path for just the backend migration to using an Azure SQL 2012 geo-redundant and load balanced environment. There are 4 sets of Azure data centers to choose from USA East and West Coast, Asia Pacific, and Europe. And there is nothing preventing you from having 4 copies of your site running on 4 different Geo-located Data Centers, each with geo-redundancy inside or outside of the local Geo-Zone and load balancing.

Here is how you can assess whether or not you have any "HEAPS" in your non-Azure SQL Server DB. HEAPS are just tables without a Clustered Index which ending up causing very slow Table Scans from top to bottom searching for the required record since there is no appropriate index available. SQL Azure will not permit such tables to be used on their systems due to slow performance issues.